dozen and so are you!" "I am not a dime a
dozen!" Willy roars back. "I am Willy
Loman, and you are Biff Loman!" Willy
has never actually known his boys-he
knows only his dream of them. He has
never reflected back a true picture of
them; he has never let the truth be spoken.
As a result, the family has lived a collec-
tive lie, which endures even after it is de-
nounced. When Bitt: crying and broken,
begs his father, "Will you let me go, for
Christ's sake? Will you take that phony
dream and burn it before something hap-
pens?," it's a searing moment-and Gar-
field, as Bitt: makes the heartbreak sing.
But Willy, on seeing tears in his son's eyes,
announces, with astonishment and ela-
tion, "Isn't that. . . isn't that remarkable?
Biff! He likes me!" At a stroke, he elimi-
nates the negative: hate becomes love, and
suicide becomes a father's heroic sacrifice
in order to jump-start Biff's success with
an insurance payout. "That boy . . . that
boy is going to be . . . magnificent," Willy
says, "choking with his love." The love is
pure; it's the fantasy that's perverse. The
greatest loss is the loss of an illusion; Willy
goes to his grave with his mad, destructive
dream intact.
Cast to aT, and beautiful in all its
scenic dimensions (with J 0 Mielziner's
original, 1949 set design), this staging of
"Death of a Salesman" is the best I ex-
pect to see in my lifetime.
^ ccordingtoArthur Miller, Tennessee
.r\.. Williams's plays gave a new genera-
tion of playwrights, including Miller, "a li-
cense to speak at full throat." Williams's
lyric voice, with all its daring, poetic
flamboyance, is nowhere better on show
than in his fantastical 1953 allegory
"Camino Real," a bold departure and a fa-
mous flop. "This one was meant most for
the vulgarity of performance," Williams
wrote in his Afterword to the play, but I
don't think the vulgarity of what Calixto
Bieito calls his "new version"-a sort of
poetic splatter painting (co-adapted by
Bieito and Marc Rosich, at Chicago's
Goodman Theatre)-was quite what he
had in mind.
The Goodman marquee refers to the
show as "Tennessee Williams's 'Camino
Real.' " What is onstage, however, is a co-
authorship that doesn't remotely repre-
sent Williams's vision or his dramatic
voice. 'What does it mean to me today?
And what can I express of myself with
98 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 26, 2012
this?" are the questions that Bieito, who is
Spanish, is quoted as posing, when he was
asked to do his first American-built pro-
duction, three years ago. Watching this
"Camino Real," one imagines that Bieito
fell asleep while researching Williams and
dreamed a collage of the playwright's
lines-a sort of zany meta -poetry-in
which snatches of "Camino" , s dialogue
are fused with choice bits lifted from
other poems, characters, songs, and
memoirs. A prologue is spoken by the
Dreamer (Michael Medeiros), an old,
drunken, vomiting poet, who dies after
ingesting a bottle cap-a character who
doesn't appear in Williams's script, and
who represents the exact opposite of the
romantic spirit of the play. In this twenty-
seven-line passage alone, there are refer-
ences to Williams's 1972 poem "Old
Men Go Mad at Night" and to his plays
"Summer and Smoke" (1948) and "A
Streetcar Named Desire" (1947). Taken
out of context and crunched together,
these fragments lose their point and a lot
of their beauty. The speech is referential
without being relevant. It's a bit like com-
pacting a Mercedes into a block of steel
and calling it a luxury car.
"Camino Real" is set in the imaginary
main plaza of a port town, whose central
fountain has dried up-"The spring of
humanity has gone dry in this place,"
Sancho Panza says. In an arid, threaten-
ing, bizarre landscape, where dreamers
and troublemakers are killed and swept
away by street cleaners, where the word
hermano ("brother") is forbidden, where
the only birds are wild ones that have
been captured and locked in cages, the
denizens of the Camino Real-who are
mostly legends of literature-shuttle in
perpetual jeopardy between a ritzy hotel
and a flophouse. They live under con-
stant financial threat, literally and sym-
bolically in fear of being " discredited."
From Kilroy to the trapped Romantics
(Lord Byron, Proust's Baron de Charlus,
Don Qyixote, Dumas's Marguerite
Gautier), the characters inhabit a freak-
ish world, warped by desperation and
pitched between desire and retreat.
Bieito, who is a marvellous stager, is
not much of a thinker; his production is
recklessly, exuberantly, even sometimes
elegantly, wrongheaded. It's goofing on a
grand scale. Although he incorporates
many of Williams's charming musical
suggestions-the Mexican songs and the
singing are lovely-all Williams's stage
directions (and, therefore, all his inten-
tions) have been cut. Gone, too, are the
characters Sancho Panza and Don Qgi-
xote and the notion of a quest that they
embodied; the play's landscape, with its
clearly defined division between rich and
poor; and the narrative characterizations
of the dramatis personae, who are so rad-
ically pruned of story as to have become
notional figures evoking a generalized
barbarity. The production is about design,
not depth; composition, not contempla-
tion. You can admire its look, but you
can't connect to its cropped characters.
Here, without a wall to write on, Kil-
roy loses his poignance; the whore Es-
mereldàs prayer, which might be consid-
ered Williams's mission statement and
the finest of his monologues, is never spo-
ken. "God bless all con men and hustlers
and pitchmen who hawk their hearts on
the street, all two-time losers who're likely
to lose once more," that speech begins. It
ends, "Let there be something to mean
the word honor again!" The words would
be as much of a red flag to the fundamen-
talists of our day as they were to the rabid
conservatives of the fifties. In this produc-
tion, however, as far as I could tell, the
only political statement, besides the de-
rigueur police brutality, is made by
outfitting Lord Byron (Mark L. Mont-
gomery), an icon of Romanticism, in a
straitjacket made from an American
flag-an image with as much iconoclas-
tic clout as a popgun. Instead of register-
ing political disenchantment, this pro-
duction allows the Baron de Charlus
(André de Shields) to swagger down-
stage, for reasons known only to himself:
and sing Screamin' Jay Hawkins's "I Put
a Spell on You."
After the performance, I stayed in the
theatre for a discussion session with about
thirty bewildered audience members. A
show of hands revealed that most of them
had never read "Camino Real." They
thought they'd just seen Tennessee Wil-
liams's play; they were surprised to learn
otherwise. I applaud the Goodman's
ambition but not the mischief of this
approach. The play begs for the rigor of
interpretation, not the caprice of decon-
struction. At the end of the lively talk-
back session, the dramaturge leading it,
Neena Arndt, said, "If Tennessee Wil-
liams were alive today, 1'm sure he would
love what were doing." Now you know. .